I rather fell into B2B networking and sales shortly after university, largely by chance. In my early roles, what surprised me was how often senior people would ask what I was seeing elsewhere — what patterns were repeating, which ideas kept resurfacing. Being asked those questions as a relatively junior person sharpened my interest in spotting common dynamics across very different industries and organisations.
Alongside that, I spent three years working as an economic journalist and project director, based in Madrid. That work involved researching and interviewing political and business leaders across a wide range of economic and institutional contexts. What stayed with me was not individual viewpoints, but how similar forces showed up again and again: incentives shaping behaviour, informal power overriding formal plans, and decisions being constrained by context as much as by intent.
Over time, that fed a broader interest in systems thinking and in how people make decisions inside complex environments. Long before it became professionally useful, I was reading widely on business, mental models, and judgement under uncertainty — not as theory for its own sake, but as a way of making sense of what I kept observing in practice.
Since 2011, my focus has been on applying those patterns where the rubber actually hits the road. There is no shortage of webinars, white papers, and conferences setting out future visions or celebrating success stories. They can help establish direction. What they rarely help with is deciding what to do next while still running the day job.
Turning vision into reality means finding signal in noise, separating fact from fiction, identifying priorities, building credible business cases and proofs of concept, keeping stakeholders aligned, and scaling what works without losing momentum. Across industries, I kept seeing capable teams struggle not through lack of intelligence or ambition, but because decisions hardened before the problem was properly framed.
BestPractice.Club was created to address that gap. The work centres on creating space for leaders to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges, ask candid “how did you actually do this?” questions, and access practical, impartial perspectives. The aim is tangible progress built through clearer thinking, better decisions, and sustained follow-through.
This page shows all the current person engages with BestPractice.Club across:
Most supply chain functions have AI ambitions. Far fewer have a reliable method for identifying which ones are worth pursuing — or a business case that will get the foundational work funded.
Three questions decide whether a planning transformation succeeds. All three are routinely answered from inside the organisation, which is structurally one of the least reliable conditions for answering them honestly.
Most planning transformations fail between knowing something needs to change and committing to a direction. This article names what that gap actually contains, why it gets skipped, and what filling it well looks like in practice.
Supply chain leaders know the investment case for resilience and capability. The harder question is why it keeps failing — and what practitioners are doing differently to get it through. Drawing on a BPC online roundtable hosted by James Moffatt of Baringa.
Most supply chain AI initiatives are launched under pressure to act rather than in response to a clearly identified problem. A BPC discussion hosted by Infor's Andrew Dalziel surfaces the disconnect — and what separates organisations seeing returns from those stuck in pilot purgatory.
A practitioner discussion on cost-to-serve trade-offs across service, working capital and margin. What leaders are actually experiencing, where simulation helps, and why the finance relationship is often the hardest constraint to shift.
Insights from a discussion hosted by Andy Devlin on how to test assumptions about data readiness in supply chain AI initiatives, focusing on use-case sufficiency and sequencing.
Insights from a practitioner discussion hosted by Andy Devlin on how supply chain leaders can align digital accountability with dispersed data ownership when shaping AI and automation initiatives.
Many supply chains appear stable but rely on planning assumptions that no longer hold. This article explains why average-based planning struggles in volatile environments and why failure often goes unnoticed.
The trade-off between service, cost and cash is widely accepted in supply chains. This article challenges whether it is truly unavoidable, or a consequence of how planning decisions are framed.
Industrial manufacturing supply chains face long horizons, capital-intensive assets, and decisions that are hard to reverse. This article explores how leaders should prioritise once data reliability improves—focusing on commitment points, optionality, and scenarios that change capacity, sourcing, and customer promises. It’s for manufacturing leaders moving from analysis to sequencing: choosing the first moves that reduce regret and build resilience.
Once you accept that transformation is a decision problem, the next step is testing what must be true for value to appear. This article sets out practical enabling conditions that turn better data and systems into better decisions—process clarity, actionable agility, trusted data, and customer-facing productivity. It’s aimed at leaders who are pressure-testing readiness and assumptions before prioritising initiatives or engaging vendors.
Even when priorities are clear, organisations often stall because they don’t know what ‘ready’ looks like. This article sets out calm, practical signals of decision readiness: ownership, evidence thresholds, alignment on risk, and the ability to adapt when assumptions change. It also explains why post-event momentum often fades, and how to structure follow-up so it supports decisions without pushing premature sales conversations.
Many transformation programmes stall not because the technology is wrong, but because organisations never align on which decisions matter most and what must change to improve them. This perspective introduces the 'value void' and explains why common explanations (data, change management, readiness) miss the underlying constraint: shared decision clarity. It’s for supply chain and transformation leaders who are orienting around where to start before investing in tools or programmes.
A decision-led perspective on where to start in food and beverage supply chains once data improves, focusing on prioritisation, trade-offs, and decision leverage.
The post argues that supply chain forecasting often fails because companies focus on tools rather than decisions. Drawing on multinational IBP and S&OP experience, it highlights how over-complex AI-driven systems are frequently adopted before organisations are clear on what they actually need to decide, over what time horizons, and at what level of detail. Clean, reliable data must come before technology, and simpler, iterative forecasting approaches—often piloted or custom-built—can deliver faster, cheaper value than defaulting to large, “safe” vendors. The real objective is not perfect forecast accuracy, but greater execution agility in an increasingly volatile environment.
Supply chain and logistics have shifted from operational overhead to strategic priority. This article examines what is driving investor interest: market growth, M&A momentum, digital transformation, private equity activity, sustainability demands and infrastructure investment, and what the gap between venture funding in Europe and the US signals about where opportunity may be concentrated.
Alignment between business strategy and supply chain strategy is usually assumed rather than built. This article, drawing on research with around 20 supply chain leaders, examines why the gap opens at the point of strategy formation, widens through the year as conditions shift, and what the structural causes are — including metric misalignment, planning cycle design and the absence of supply chain input at the point where targets are set.
The supply chain and logistics technology sector is consolidating fast. This article explores the market trends driving M&A activity — AI and automation adoption, cloud-based SCM, sustainability compliance, TMS and WMS growth — and the investment logic behind private equity and strategic acquirer behaviour, with data on deal volumes, growth projections and the areas attracting the most attention.
ERP systems were built for stability, not volatility. Part 1 of this series examines why legacy architecture has become a bottleneck rather than an enabler, drawing on practitioner conversations and research to explore technical debt, the high failure rate of large transformation programmes, and why the sequence of change — operating model before systems — is so consistently misunderstood.
An overview of where value creation opportunities are concentrating in UK and European supply chain and logistics in 2025, covering digital transformation priorities, unified data systems, advanced forecasting, infrastructure investment, sustainability reporting reform and emerging competitive dynamics including InPost's disruption of the parcel delivery market.
Waterfall change management was designed for a stable world. Part 2 of this series examines why linear, multi-year transformation programmes routinely fail to keep pace with operational reality, why agile approaches are often adopted in name only, and what the companies that adapted fastest during Covid had in common that others lacked.
The gap between AI ambition and AI readiness in supply chains is large and growing. Part 3 of this series explores why skills shortages, fragmented data and governance gaps consistently prevent digital programmes from scaling, why the 1% of organisations that have fully automated processes with AI is not a surprise to practitioners, and what becoming AI fit actually requires.
Building the business case for supply chain innovation is a tightrope. Part 4 of this series examines why SaaS costs are frequently misunderstood, how technical debt inflates the real cost of every new investment, why only 12% of large digital programmes deliver sustainable returns, and how mismatched payback horizons between boards and supply chain programmes undermine investment confidence.
Lidl spent an estimated €500 million over seven years on an SAP implementation before reverting to its legacy system. This article examines what went wrong, why the project became a reference point in supply chain conversations about large-scale transformation, and what Lidl's subsequent approach to targeted, modular investment suggests about how the failure may have shaped its innovation strategy.
Cybersecurity incidents at JLR, Marks & Spencer and Co-op cost hundreds of millions and disrupted physical operations. Part 5 of this series examines why supply chain leaders can no longer treat security as IT's problem, how fragmented governance creates accountability gaps, and what regulatory pressure from DORA and the classification of UK incidents as systemic events means for how innovation programmes are approved and scoped.
Systems and methods matter but culture is often the deciding factor. Part 6 of this series explores why pilots rarely survive the transition to scale, how fragmentation between IT, supply chain and finance creates the conditions for innovation to stall, why shadow spreadsheets persist as a symptom of broken trust, and what research says about the cultural conditions that allow digital transformation to compound rather than stall.
Graham Whittemore is founder of Peakview Labs and previously held senior supply chain roles at Amazon, Wayfair and CVS. In this conversation with JP Doggett, he argues that integration is the central nervous system of composable architecture, explains why ERP is no longer the centre of gravity in the supply chain tech ecosystem, and explores how low-code tools and AI are lowering the cost of experimentation for operators.
Ravi Wesley is a venture capital investor at Marula Square and formerly Industry Strategist at Blue Yonder. In this conversation with JP Doggett, he challenges how supply chain innovation is financially framed, explains why reactive innovation cycles produce poor outcomes, warns against vendors rebranding existing products as composable, and explores what agentic AI actually requires from an architectural standpoint.
Nick Miles spent over seven years at Burberry, leading supply chain IT and later IT strategy. In this conversation with JP Doggett, he reflects on how Burberry moved from a monolithic transformation approach to composable, best-of-breed solutions, what governance of innovation investment actually requires, and how to engage vendors in a way that distinguishes credible capability from sales talk.
John McFall and Martin McKie are co-founders of Supply Chain Wise and former AWS leaders. In this conversation with JP Doggett, they explain why burning-platform innovation cycles produce inflated business cases and eroded trust, why Excel persists as the shadow control tower in most large supply chains, and how governance and procurement strategy can create the optionality that breaks the current cycle.
Composable and agile supply chain innovation is often discussed in abstract terms. This article brings the conversation down to ground level, exploring what modular approaches actually look like in practice, where the best starting points are inside complex legacy environments, and how a crawl-walk-run model connects incremental capability-building to a longer-term operating model.
Zoe Webster has spent over 25 years in AI, from computer science research to shaping national strategy at Innovate UK, leading BT's AI enablement centre and working as an independent adviser. In this conversation with JP Doggett, she explains why scepticism about AI is legitimate, why framing the problem before selecting the technology is the critical step most organisations skip, and how to avoid the Betamax trap of committing to a technology whose standards shift.
Professor Glenn Parry of Surrey Business School has spent 25 years researching value in supply chains, servitisation and ecosystem orchestration. In this conversation with JP Doggett, he explains why ERP remains a one-size-fits-nobody solution, why value must be specified before transformation is attempted, how composability offers deeper resilience than visibility dashboards, and why trust is always the deciding factor in whether technology-led change actually holds.
Supply chain operators and startups want to work together. Both sides report the same frustrations. This article, drawing on conversations with founders, investors and supply chain leaders, examines why the gap persists: career risk on the operator side, trust and integration barriers in procurement, the fragility of internal champions, and what a portfolio approach to innovation might look like if operators borrowed thinking from investors.
Trevor Jordaan is Senior Director at Blue Yonder, one of the few major supply chain vendors to explicitly frame its product strategy around composability. In this conversation with JP Doggett, he explains what composability means in practice rather than in marketing, why organisational readiness is the harder problem than technology, and what becoming AI fit requires from supply chain leaders, teams and governance structures.